Teaching me this lesson, Doyle would say, “You don’t need power on it, Timmy. Just say good morning to the ball.”
It’s a phrase of Johnny’s that I still remember—and teach in my youth academies to this day: Say good morning to the ball.
Johnny Doyle taught emotions and attitudes as much as technical ability, physical drills, tactics and strategies on the pitch. He was the kind of football tutor who took on kids who’d been rejected for a variety of reasons, who could work with kids who didn’t even need physical training but needed only mental strengthening.
That was often my problem as a kid—I lacked the mental skills that are often crucial in determining the outcome of a match. Few men I’ve ever met in football truly understand the psychological side of the game the way Johnny Doyle did.
If I’d had a match with my club team and been tentative about shooting, Johnny would help me get inside my own thought processes.
“Tim,” he’d say, “why didn’t you take the shot? What were you afraid of? You know you can hit that green door. You hit that five times out of seven—with your right foot and your left. Now picture yourself doing it in a game. What’s the difference? The only difference is that there’s more people around you, there’s an atmosphere that you need to block out.”
Johnny Doyle understood that there was no way you can achieve success, maybe even greatness as an athlete—or anything in life, really—if you’re not mentally tough.
“Hit the door, Tim,” he’d say. “It’s a fraction of the size of a real goal. Maybe one-fifth of a proper goal. Now take that small area and hit it every single time with power.”
I took the confidence that came from earning Johnny Doyle’s golden bicycles and transferred it to my competitive match play.
And, in later years, whenever I was out on the pitch, I still aimed for Johnny Doyle’s green door. The sense of inner pride, earning that golden bicycle, was immense. When I hit that green door with my left foot, it felt as big as if I’d scored a goal for Australia in the World Cup.
It used to be in Australia that football was known as the sport of immigrants. Football—or “soccer” as it’s still generally called—wasn’t seen as a real Australian sport in the same way that cricket and rugby union were, even though we’ve produced world-class Australian footballers for decades.
This was already changing quite bit when I was a kid in the 1980s, but traditionally the sport hierarchy remained: cricket, rugby league, and Australian rules football.
They’ve been the dominant sports in the country and to this day remain the most popular. Football was seen as a game that had “flown here” with the immigrants.
This led to some ugliness over the years, and I heard about it even as a youth player. Some of the kids’ fathers who grew up in Australia would talk about how the sport used to be referred to as wogball.
Wog is a derogatory term for the immigrant Europeans—Greeks, Italians, Croatians, Serbians, Latin Americans—who were seen as the only people who played and enjoyed the sport. Fortunately, you almost never hear anyone in Australia calling it wogball any more.
Even in my youngest playing days, I got thrown into that ethnic melting pot. Sydney Olympic Football Club played a huge part in my development. They were known throughout Sydney as the Greek team. Everything associated with the club was Greek. They had some other nationalities playing in the squad, but for the supporters, the hard-core fan-base, everything was Greek: the blue and white flags, the food eaten at the matches, the songs sung in the stands. It was a club run by Greeks, backed by Greeks, with a flavour straight out of Athens. First known as the Pan Hellenic Football Club, established in 1957 in Sydney by Greek immigrants, the team soon became one of the mainstays of the National Soccer League (NSL).
Sydney Olympic’s main rivals were the Marconi Stallions, an Italian club to the core. Everywhere you looked in their stadium you’d see the tricolour flag of Italy—green, white and red. Men sported the Marconi Stallion jerseys and sometimes the famous Azzurri shirt of the Italian national team. In fact, Christian Vieri, the great Italian striker—tied for first as Italy’s record World Cup goal-scorer, along with Roberto Baggio and Paolo Rossi—lived in Sydney when he was younger and played for the Marconi Stallions.
Sydney Olympic had a well-run youth system with Under-12, Under-13, Under-14 teams, all the way up to the reserves and the first team, which competed in the NSL. All the best kids who lived close by me wanted to trial at Olympic. If you lived closer to Marconi, you trialled there. Some youth players who lived in my area felt Marconi was the better club. It was often a matter of heated debate among us kids.
The first step to becoming part of the Olympic “family” was to get invited to trials. I first made it at age eleven, playing with my brother Sean in the Under-12s. Again, my dad felt I was always ready to play up an age, but it meant I was always the smallest kid on the pitch.
When you got selected, your parents would get a letter, then you’d go round to the Sydney Olympic clubhouse and collect the tracksuits and your kit. I remember how much pride I felt in that tracksuit: cobalt-blue and white with the Olympic crest. Alongside my replica Manchester United kits, kept immaculate in my bedroom, I now added my own Sydney Olympic kit and tracksuit.
The training sessions had an air of intense competition. The place was jammed. Dads parked in all different corners of the ground, wherever they could find a spot, and each kid had to bring his own football. From the moment you arrived, fathers would have their kids stretching, kicking the ball against the back wall, practising heading.
My brother Sean and I were always together, so we’d start straightaway passing the ball back and forth, juggling, heading it. I would keep my tracksuit on as if I was warming up for the big-time professional leagues. I’d do my stretching and warm-ups, and once it was time for training I’d strip off my tracksuit bottoms, then my top, and sprint out as if it was the start of a match. That’s how serious I was at that young age and it was no different for the kids from Greek backgrounds. Sydney Olympic was the pinnacle; it was the highest level of football they could ever envisage playing.
The key was to impress the coaches. There was never a moment to slack off. Every drill, every touch, every pass, shot and dribble was scrutinized. Sydney Olympic had one youth coach, George Psaroudis, who had a lot of faith in my brother Sean as a goalkeeper. Some people said I’d only made the team because Sean was so good at that position. In fact, I think it was Coach Psaroudis who first said to Sean, “Don’t let fear hold you back,” but my brother took that phrase and made it his own.
This made every weekend a trial game for me. I was under the microscope. But I found my rhythm, was strong and creative in midfield, and made an impact pretty quickly for my club. People would start saying on the touchline: “Well, done. Young Tim Cahill’s played well.”
I started scoring a lot of goals for Olympic. If you were a youth player and you made it into the starting eleven of Sydney Olympic, Marconi Stallions or Sydney United, you were on the radar as a top prospect. No guarantees of course, but you could sense you might be on the road to making it as a professional in the NSL.
One of the best things about being in the Under-12 team was that I got a job being a ball boy for Sydney Olympic first team. There was an incredible atmosphere at every home match. In the stands behind me, the chanting would come in waves. Olympic! Olympic! It would start slow, then grow faster, with clapping in the rhythm to those syllables:
“Ohhhh-lymmm-pic!”
When the home team scored, the grounds erupted as if it was a match in Europe. Throughout the match, I’d fetch balls for the first-team players for throw-ins and corner kicks, sprinting up and down the touchline, thinking, One day I’m going to play for Olympic, in the first team, and maybe if I’m lucky I’ll score boatloads of goals for them.
It was an incredibly family-friendly atmosphere. Tons of kids in the stands with their parents. During